I used to have a link to a brilliant website that tracked the multiple millions of dollars Senator Scott Brown got from various oil companies to block green policy. Wish I knew where it went.

Yeah, it's only the oil companies and their political shills who have a financial stake in this debate.

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Edit: By the way, to put the economics into perspective, Iceland is one of the greenest countries in the world, and as of 2010 also just happened to be in the best shape economically following the financial meltdown. Which is not to suggest causation, but there is certainly something to be said for correlation.

So, you acknowledge that the correlation doesn't prove anything...but you're still going to conclude that their embrace of all things green deserves credit? It could as easily be said that their economy is recovering in spite of the energy policies they're implementing.

A better explanation for their recent growth is that their financial sector imploded and the central bank was incapable of providing a bailout big enough. As a result, all the bad investments were liquidated and they were able to begin rebuilding.

I said there's no surefire indication of causation, I never said anything about there being a weak correlation.

And in any case, listen to GP. He knows more econ than I do and would probably agree with me all the same that in the long run, clean energy is a lot more economically beneficial, and for more reasons than the purely financial.

I used to have a link to a brilliant website that tracked the multiple millions of dollars Senator Scott Brown got from various oil companies to block green policy. Wish I knew where it went.

Yeah, it's only the oil companies and their political shills who have a financial stake in this debate.

So say you're a green technologies company; you enter a field that is already distorted in the favor of oil companies, becuase they've been lobbying for decades, and have basically bought off the government. How do you compete? You could have a better product, but that won't matter, this is clearly not an example of a free-market, it's a corrupt market. You're forced into lobbying, and trying to buy favors, just to even the playing field, so that other market functions can work, and our lives can all improve.

Also, another implication is just how much of a threat these oil companies see green technology as being. If green technology stood no chance, as you claim, then the oil companies wouldn't be spending millions / billions of dollars to try and block their implementation.

It's also completely disingenuous to suggest that the small "green" technology sector has anywhere near the kind of weight and influence of the largest industry in the world, or even that of the gigantic coal lobby.

Logged

"In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad idea."

I used to have a link to a brilliant website that tracked the multiple millions of dollars Senator Scott Brown got from various oil companies to block green policy. Wish I knew where it went.

Yeah, it's only the oil companies and their political shills who have a financial stake in this debate.

So say you're a green technologies company; you enter a field that is already distorted in the favor of oil companies, becuase they've been lobbying for decades, and have basically bought off the government. How do you compete? You could have a better product, but that won't matter, this is clearly not an example of a free-market, it's a corrupt market. You're forced into lobbying, and trying to buy favors, just to even the playing field, so that other market functions can work, and our lives can all improve.

Though I think you're exaggerating their effect, I agree. End the oil subsidies

Humanity has done little to address climate change. Global emissions of carbon dioxide reached (another) all-time peak in 2010. The most recent international talks to craft a global treaty to address the problem pushed off major action until 2020. Fortunately, there's an alternative—curbing the other greenhouse gases.

Specifically, in the case of rapid action to slow catastrophic climate change, the best alternatives appear to be: methane and black carbon (otherwise known as soot). A new economic and scientific analysis published in Science on January 13 of the benefits of cutting these two greenhouse gases finds the benefits to be manifold—from human health to increased agricultural yields.

Even better, by analyzing some 400 potential soot- and methane-emission control measures, the international team of researchers found that just 14 deliver "nearly 90 percent" of the potential benefits. Bonus: the 14 steps also restrain global warming by roughly 0.5 degree Celsius by 2050, according to computer modeling.

That's because both methane and black carbon only remain in the atmosphere for a short time compared with CO2. As atmospheric physicist Veerabhadran Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, said of such efforts to reduce atmospheric soot a few years ago: "If the world pays attention and puts resources to it, we will see an effect immediately. I'm talking weeks, at most a few months, not decades or centuries."

The 14 measures that would immediately slow global warming are:

—Eliminate methane releases from coal mines—particularly in China—by capturing it and burning it.—Eliminate the venting or accidental release of methane co-produced by oil drilling (and, of course, gas drilling itself), particularly in Africa, the Middle East and Russia.—Capture gas from landfills in the U.S. and China as well as promote recycling and composting of biodegradable trash.—Occasionally aerate flooded rice paddies to prevent the growth of methane-producing microbes.—Stop leaks from natural gas pipelines, particularly in Russia.—Use bio-digesters—vessels in which microbes break down manure into gas—to cut methane from livestock globally.—Update wastewater treatment plants to capture methane.—Filter the soot produced by incomplete combustion of diesel fuel in vehicles, and attempt to eliminate inefficient internal combustion engine vehicles entirely.—Replace indoor cooking and heating fires with clean-burning cookstoves fired either by wood, manure or other biomass or, even better, methane.—Replace traditional brick kilns with more advanced firing methods.—Replace traditional ovens for turning coal to coke with modern technologies.—Ban the open burning of crop stubble and other agricultural waste.

The researchers estimate that cutting those 14 together could avoid between 700,000 and 4.7 million premature deaths (largely from smoky, unhealthy air) and increase crop yields by between 30 million and 135 million metric tons (due to concomitant reductions in ground-level ozone, otherwise known as smog, which forms from fugitive methane and blights crops in Brazil, China, India, the U.S. and elsewhere). In addition, the economic analysis suggests that many of these measures provide more value in benefits than they cost to implement.

You can read the rest of the article at the link above, but I think this speaks for it well enough. Solve global warming without really having to do anything, and save money in the process? Sounds like just the thing climate skeptics have been waiting for.

Not to mention the implications of a naturally occurring and renewable source of natural gas, meaning no (immediate) need to ditch the oil economy completely. Win-win for climate alarmists and skeptics alike.

Yeah, and this is not to say I won't still be championing the cause of carbon mitigation through measures like developing clean tech and the green economy, but it does take a lot of heat off the cause in terms of the economics and whatnot.

There's your problem. I can show you plenty of places that confirm the planet is warming. In fact, even from my own, individual perspective I can see the planet is warming. Although one shouldn't make the mistake that it's weather that's warming, but rather the system, which is causing more erratic climatic behavior.

And in any event, as my previous article points out, we should still be shifting towards renewable energies and the like, especially considering we now have a way of doing so that's not only not unbearably costly but indeed potentially extravagantly profitable.

Besides, there's still the physical fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and the uncontrolled and massive pollution of CO2 is bad, no matter how you figure it. There's a lot we don't know about the climate, which is all the more reason we should not want to mettle with it.

If we're worried about more CO2 then plant more crops. People are not going to reduce their standard of living. Want to buy some carbon credits?

Are there really that many area's of the world that can grow plants that aren't growing plants?

Though, someone came up with a pretty ingenious method to catch dew in deserts, which then feed tree's, giving them enough time to root down and get some water. That could actually be a good way to reduce desertification, and desertification would be a problem either way.

As another side point, we should probably reintroduce more predators in the Wilderness. Predators kill elk / deer, elk/deer kill sapling tree's and produce more grasslands. More predators = more forests = better carbon sequestering.

Actually the point Scheavo and I have been making over the course of this thread is that people's standard of living actually doesn't need to change drastically in order to protect our environment...

It kind of does. The Western way of life is fundamentally unsustainable. There's no question about that.

There's a lot we could do that wouldn't really effect our lifestyle. Geothermal would reduce energy costs by a lot, and doesn't require us to change jack shit. Same goes for solar panels. Of course, this is just in regards to CO2, our overall nature of consumption is, by definition, unsustainable.

They will if the American Christians stop sending them bags of rice every week.

Actually, charity can be rather detrimental to developing economies, to the point that crops in those countries are literally rotting on the the vine while nearby families starve. How can local farmers compete with free food? It's the old "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a night. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for life," adage.

I would also like to point out that climate science has found that even the minor, gradual and rather temporary instances of global warming and cooling in our past have led to the collapse of entire empires. The upcoming scenario is none of these.

Oh, I don't care about the third world. They're basically all in the stone age and we've thrown enough money and aid at them to no real results. I just meant with more CO2, plant more crops (wherever) to absorb. Personally, I'd go for hemp..plenty of uses and it grows like crazy.

Oh, I don't care about the third world. They're basically all in the stone age and we've thrown enough money and aid at them to no real results. I just meant with more CO2, plant more crops (wherever) to absorb. Personally, I'd go for hemp..plenty of uses and it grows like crazy.

I'm honestly not sure if you are trolling or whether you really are that apathetic. Either way its quite depressing.

In any case to answer your question about why growing more crops is bad: crops in and of themselves on average dont actually remove any CO2 because in using them you typically return the CO2 back to the system (eating them, burning them, whatever) . And considering how much oil/natural gas is used in generating things like fertilisers, harvesting, transportation, processing/storing etc, you actually dump more CO2 into the ecosystem on average.

And as I said, the Third World won't be the only people affected. To be frank, climate change will impact everyone negatively. And hey, the Third World actually produces a sizable chunk of our foodstuffs and other imports, and if they go down you can say goodbye to the standard of living you so cherish.